We did it! On September 26th, we achieved a huge milestone: 500 million Symfony packages have been downloaded by the PHP community! Thank you to the countless developers, contributors, companies, conferences and users that have made this massive number a reality. The Symfony ecosystem now consists of over 70 packages, several of which are downloaded, on average, over 50 thousand times every day!

The rest of the post talks about the road that lead to 500 million downloads, the pervasiveness of Symfony components and the work they've done on the Backwards Compatibility Promise and Continuous Upgrade Path. The post also includes several pictures members of the Symfony community took as the counter approached the 500 million mark.

Jason McCreary, the developer behind the Laravel Shift upgrade service, has posted a retrospective of his work on the project and some of the things he's learned along the way. The service just recently topped 1000 applications upgraded.

In this post, I want to focus more on reaching the milestone of 1,000 Laravel applications upgraded. This may not sound like many, however for my first SaaS product it marks the achievement of my stretch goal. So allow me to share the most important decision, biggest challenge, and what the future holds for Laravel Shift.

He starts with a section talking about the difference between a "project" and a "product" targeted at developers who, usually, have more than one project going at a time. He talks about his decision to move Shift to a "product" and some of the hurdles he hit because of being "a developer, not a marketer". He finishes the post looking ahead to things coming with the service and the announcement of "human services" being offered to get a live person involved in the upgrade of your Laravel application.

Fans of the Monolog logging library (used by loads of major PHP-based projects too) will be interested in checking out this post about version 2 from Jordi Boggiano, lead developer on the project.

Monolog's first commit was on February 17th, 2011. That is almost 5 years ago! I have now been thinking for quite a while that it would be nice to start on a v2, and being able to drop some baggage.

One of the main questions when doing a major release is which minimum PHP version to support going forward. Last summer I decided I wanted to do a big jump from 5.3 and directly target PHP 7. It provides a lot of nice features as well as performance improvements, and as Monolog is one of the most installed packages on Packagist I wanted to help nudge everyone towards PHP 7.

Now that PHP 7 has been released, he's moving even more towards this goal for version 2 of the popular tool. He talks about "the road forward" and links to a milestone that's been set up with issues to correct and features to update before v2.0 can be called stable. He does offer a word of warning too - if you use dev-master for your Composer installs, update it to use ^1.17 instead as the main branch will break soon with the work for v2.

Cal Evans is back with the latest part of his "Be a Better Client" series of posts focusing on how the person asking for the work to be done can interface with those doing the work more effectively. This time his recommendation is about deadlines.

Regardless of whether it is a large or small project, don't set one final deadline, set regular milestones. If it' a week-long project, figure out what will be delivered each day and set daily milestones. Larger projects will have them spaced out more but either way, make sure that you have them at regular intervals and that all major deliverables are assigned a milestone.

He points out that a single deadline only does one thing - lets the project know when to be done. It shows absolutely no progress along the way. Milestones are much more effective at this.

Make sure your developer is reporting back to you on a regular basis. At the very least you should have a status meeting at each milestone to make sure it was hit. For larger projects you will need meetings between the milestones to make sure the project stays on track.

NETTUTS.com has posted their top ten list of some of the largest milestones in web development - one of which is the release of PHP.

Some believe the progression of the great World Wide Web to be a travesty, others a godsend. Regardless, the Internet has evolved over the past few decades, and is in many ways better for the web developer. New technologies have come about that have made web development much easier to get started in, and ultimately more fun.

For the Eclipse PHP developers out there anxiously awaiting the next major release of the extension, you'll have to wait just a bit longer. Max Horvath mentions a few of the reasons why:

As expected by many, Eclipse PDT's next major release has been postponed. While two milestones couldn't be released, it became clearer and clearer that the release date of September 15th 2008 couldn't be met.

The new deadline has been set though - December 29th, 2008. New improvements in this release will include a type hierarchy view, new PHP explorer functionality, code templates and a code assist for dynamic variables. There was also a large change to the API that set things back a bit.

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the final release version of Serendipity 1.0, an advanced and flexible blogging/cms web application. With its comprehensive feature set, including multiple authors, internationalization, templated output, and an open plugin architecture, Serendipity's stable 1.0 release is ready to become the most popular Web application in the world!

You can get the full story in their latest blog post today, including the latest bugfixes, how to upgrade your current installation, the future of the project, and, of course, the "thank you"s going out to all those that helped.

The Serendipity Team is proud to announce the final release version of Serendipity 1.0, an advanced and flexible blogging/cms web application. With its comprehensive feature set, including multiple authors, internationalization, templated output, and an open plugin architecture, Serendipity's stable 1.0 release is ready to become the most popular Web application in the world!

You can get the full story in their latest blog post today, including the latest bugfixes, how to upgrade your current installation, the future of the project, and, of course, the "thank you"s going out to all those that helped.